I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to data processing, and more specifically to techniques for estimating distortion due to quantization of data.
II. Background
Encoding systems are widely used to process data prior to transmission or storage. An encoding system may quantize input data to obtain quantized data and may further process the quantized data to generate output data for transmission or storage. The quantized data may be represented with a set of discrete values, and the step between consecutive discrete values may be a selectable parameter. A large quantization step may result in the quantized data being more coarsely represented, which may result in larger error or more distortion between the input data and the quantized data. However, a large quantization step may allow the quantized data to be represented with fewer bits and/or may result in the quantized data containing more zeros, both of which may allow the output data to be sent at a lower rate and/or stored with less memory. Conversely, a small quantization step may result in the quantized data being more finely represented, which may result in smaller error or less distortion between the input data and the quantized data. However, a small quantization step may also result in the quantized data being represented with more bits and/or containing fewer zeros, both of which may cause the output data to be sent at a higher rate and/or stored with more memory.
There is typically a tradeoff between rate and distortion for quantized data. It may be desirable to efficiently estimate distortion so that an appropriate quantization step may be selected in the rate-distortion tradeoff.